Longtime LGBTQ ally Deborah Duncan to emcee Montrose Center gala.

When a phone call comes from this year’s Gayest & Greatest Favorite Female (Community) TV Personality, her voice sounds familiar, but I can’t quite put a name to it.

From a carpool line where she’s picking up her teenage son from school, she says, “I’ll give you three guesses: Halle Berry, Oprah Winfrey, or Deborah Duncan.” Of course it’s Deborah Duncan, the playful star of Great Day Houston on KHOU-TV, and our faithful ally since before she even knew there was an LGBTQ community.

As a teenager at John Marshall High School in San Antonio, Duncan “knew there was something different” about a friend named Rusty, but she didn’t articulate his otherness as gay until the day some classmates ran to tell her that Rusty was getting beaten up. “Since I was the only black kid in class, I guess they thought I could fight. Rusty was always so kind and sweet. I said, ‘Are you friggin’ kidding me?’” Duncan ran and stopped the fight. “Fast-forward 15 years later, I was doing television in Dallas,” Duncan says, “and we featured the Turtle Creek Chorale,” which is primarily a gay men’s chorus. “They said, ‘Someone wants to say thank you,’” recalls Duncan, revealing that it was Rusty, who told her, “You saved my life.”

Duncan later faced death herself when she was working in New York City and a brain aneurysm burst. “People prayed for me, and I got to hear all the nice things they say at your funeral, but without dying. It was a big wake-up call for me. God pointed me in the right direction, and I said, ‘Okay, I get it.’ For me, it comes down to what Martin Luther King Jr. said: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’”

Duncan counts OutSmart readers as important members of the LGBTQ community— and just as we are everywhere, so is she. “I’m at an event almost any day,” she says. This month she plans to be at The Ballroom at Bayou Place to emcee the Montrose Center’s festive 2018 Out for Good Dinner on October 11.

A graduate of the University of Texas, Duncan was selected as the honorary grand marshal for the 2015 Houston LGBT Pride Celebration. “That was a fun one,” she says, explaining that Houston’s 2015 Pride parade was held the day after the U.S. Supreme Court blessed same-sex marriage in a 5-4 ruling. For more on Duncan, visit www.khou.com/greatday.